Graphic Design Portfolio

Category: Infographic

This was the first ebook in a series. Along with creating the ebook itself, I knew my work would become a template for the rest of the series. I spent a lot of time developing the concept before I made any significant progress on the layout of content.

I wanted the template to have a signature cover, one that would make each addition to the series easily identifiable. However, inside the cover I wanted lots of flexibility. I also wanted the cover to appeal to my audience: public, academic, and special librarians. Therefore, I decided to lean upon every librarian’s love for beautiful, leather-bound books, and use a faux peek-hole in the cover to visually separate one book in the series from the next. This created a sort of dual-branding opportunity… the series having one brand, while each individual installment is allowed unique color schemes and symbols.

Once I established the concept for the series, I fleshed out the concept for this first installment. Web Services is not the most visually inspiring topic. There is a sort of design anthology connecting web services to images of clouds, but I didn’t want to lean too heavily upon that. So, I settled on a line-and-node figure as the basic motif, symbolizing how web services connects information across different databases in the internet ether. I combined this symbol with a sunrise illustration for the title-image. I feel this combination was visually interesting, hopeful, and calming (we didn’t want anybody running away because it looked to technical), while also tipping a hat to the “cloud” anthology.

I created the illustrations in Illustrator, but the interactive PDF was made in InDesign.

Have you ever needed to visually communicate the significance of quality APIs? For a long time SirsiDynix was the only company in the Library Automation Industry that offered database access. A few years back, one of SD’s competitors decided to make some APIs of their own available, but their APIs were lackluster, allowing “read-only” access alone. They also launched an email campaign targeting SD customers and mocking SD’s claim to “open” software. When customers started forwarding these marketing emails to us we decided to answer, and this was the answer we crafted. They told me to make an infographic about our APIs. I did the research and design myself and I used Illustrator during creation.

At the top of a competitive industry, some fairly odd strengths can put you in the lead. This little infographic print was intended to highlight some of those odd strengths for SirsiDynix. Done in the companies beloved “Fifty Shades of Blue,” it’s pretty and engaging.